


Star Trek Fan Fiction Fan Fiction

by solo1y



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Comedy, Cryogenics, Gen, Inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation, Meta, Metafiction, Prime Directive (Star Trek), Star Trek: The Next Generation References, Starship Enterprise (Star Trek)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 08:05:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15703185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solo1y/pseuds/solo1y
Summary: A bio-engineer from 2014 finds himself catapulted into the future into a TV show he is very lukewarm about.





	Star Trek Fan Fiction Fan Fiction

.1.  
Here's something you might already know - your government is lying to you.  
"But wait a minute," you reasonably interject, "how can you know what country I'm in or what my government is doing?"  
Well, you deluded sap, this is part of the lie. If you are living in the year 2014, then your government is either directly (through force) or indirectly (through an increasingly organised series of incentives) run by the United States. Your biggest nightmare has come true.  
Maybe you don't care. You probably shouldn't. Maybe the overt or covert American forces piloting your country's economy are doing a better job than your homegrown weasels could ever do. You don't know.

.2.  
I'm 38 years old in what you know as the year 2014. This means that during my formative years, during the last half of secondary school and the first half of my university education, there was a show called Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST: TNG) flying into our television sets every Saturday.  
I have not seen all the episodes. I've seen most of the first season, when they had a blonde girl in charge of security, and I've seen most of the second season, with the weird doctor no one liked, and a smattering of episodes from the remaining five seasons. I haven't seen any of the TNG movies, although I started watching the new reboot, with the young actors and the lens flare. I wish I had paid more attention.

.3.  
The first thing I remember after coming out of the box is Commander William Riker and Lieutenant Worf of the Starship Enterprise NCC-1701-D pointing phasers at me, accompanied by two nobodies. I pointed at their red shirts and said the first thing that popped into my head, which was, "You guys should be extra careful today; I have a feeling you might end up dead."  
In retrospect, it is entirely understandable why they took this as a hostile threat and strong-armed me through familiar corridors and a turbolift to the brig. 

.4.  
When I was a kid, I never believed in Santa Claus. I was prepared to continue the charade only because my parents got such a kick out of watching the magic unfold every Christmas morning. So, every Christmas morning, I feigned surprise and wonder until I was ten years old. I had to sit my parents down and explain everything. It was quite upsetting for me to have to disappoint my parents. Once the drama died down, my mother made me promise not to tell anyone else, whose responsibility it was to discover the wrong bits of reality for themselves.  
I told one kid in my class who I thought could handle the news, but my mother was right and I was wrong. He nearly had a full-on breakdown in the yard. Later on, in his office, the principal was leaning on my pretty heavily to find out what I said to my friend, but I remembered my mother's words, and what happened after I told my friend. I was terrified of what might ensue if the principal decided to react in a similar manner. So I said nothing and my parents were called and everything was sorted out and no one mentioned anything to me about it again.

.5.  
"Do you really have a Heisenberg Compensator?" I asked Chief Miles O'Brien the first time I met him. He told me he did, and showed me where they keep it. He seemed surprised that I would ask.  
I explained my problem, which was that the entire point of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is that it's impossible to know both the speed and position of a sub-atomic particle at the same time; not that we don't have the technology to enable its detection - it's very much impossible even in theory. Therefore, it's impossible even in theory, even with the most powerful computer imaginable, to map everyone's atomic structure and reproduce it in a way that would making teleportation a viable method of transport.  
He just laughed.  
"And yet, here we are, beaming people up and down to planets without anyone blowing apart or imploding."  
He had a point.

.6.  
After getting a doctorate in neuroscience, I specialised in cryonics. Cryonics, as you may know, is the barely scientific exploration of the idea that human tissue, usually the brain, can be frozen in stasis and thereby preserved to be thawed out by some future generation, once medical technology has advanced to such a stage that they can do something about it.  
As a life-long fan of science fiction (although not Star Trek in particular), I found the possibilities attractive. I had lots of ideas and quickly made contacts with the best people in this area. One of the few ethical guidelines we all agreed on was that any test runs of a potentially viable technology should use ourselves as guinea pigs. 

.7.  
I was presented in Picard's ready room (his personal office just off the bridge), secured on either sides by two pairs of large arms attached to two grim attitudes.  
"Do you know where you are?" he asked me.  
"I have an idea," I said. I found it difficult to avoid being flippant, but I was inside a well-known television show. There was still a possibility that the whole thing was some sort of elaborate set-up engineered by one of my massively wealthy patrons. Everything I said ran the risk of making me look like a smart-ass and at some point during this meeting, I decided I would just have to adopt that persona and run with it as a survival skill.  
"I'm told your ship - your vessel - is late 20th-century Earth. Do you know anything about that?"  
"The last time I checked it was the year 2014, so that would be about right."  
"So," said Riker, "your story is that this vessel belongs to you, and you're not an Omicronian pirate?"  
"I've never heard of Omicronian anything, and that is my vessel, yes."  
"You're telling us you're actually from the 21st century?" asked Picard.  
"Yes."  
He motioned the security people to let me go. Then he conferred quietly with Riker. They agreed to give me some small quarters and drop me off at the nearest starbase when they got the chance. Of course, this is not what happened. Not at all. 

.8.  
There are some questions which have no answers, and which therefore hold perennial fascination for tiny human minds.  
"Why do bad things happen to good people?"  
That question has no answer. Anyone who tries to sell you an answer is lying, possibly even to himself. The most honest answer is that no one knows. You could even claim that there is no possible answer, and that it is therefore not a real question. All the words are there, in the right order, but it doesn't make sense and so it doesn't count as a sentence, the defining characteristic of which is, as you may have worked out from the etymology, that it has to make sense. It's meaningless, like asking what colour freedom is, or, "Have you stopped beating your wife?"  
Another favourite is, “What happens after I die?” At least some of the intended audience deflect this thought to a different question: “What if I don’t have to die at all?”

.9.  
When I met Guinan, all I could think about was Sister Act 2, which my sister owned on DVD and insisted on using as a basis for a Christmas office party routine with three of her friends. 

.10.  
Life has a natural order to it. The life-span of an organism is how long it takes to reproduce and ensure that the young are healthy enough to reproduce themselves. We call this amount of time a “generation”. After this time has passed, it is considered good manners to die. Informally, it is often noticed that the death of a grandparent occurs close to the birth of a grandchild. This is considered serendipitous, when in fact it is an example of the natural order – the “generation” – working perfectly.  
In 2014, the human body has evolved to die after around fifty years. The bonus thirty or forty years is entirely due to modern medical practices, technology (especially pertaining to sanitation and food production) and pharmaceuticals.

.11.  
While I was being escorted to my new quarters, I noticed something. I had to act fast. I wasn’t looking forward to being dumped at some starbase I knew nothing about, subject entirely to forces beyond my control. At least here I had some idea what was going on. I leaned over to Riker.  
“I could help, you know.”  
“I’m sure you’re very helpful.”  
“Well, for one thing, that’s not Data,” I said, nodding at the android at the helm.  
Riker didn’t even interrupt his stride towards the turbolift. When we were safely between decks, he asked me what I meant.  
“Well,” I said, “I overheard him use the word ‘didn’t’. We both know Commander Data doesn’t use contractions. I’d say you have a Lore problem.”  
“You seem to know a lot for a man who’s been asleep for the last three hundred years,” he said. He did not like me one bit. He said nothing else until he deposited me at my quarters and told me to stay put, which was superfluous because he posted a guard on my door.  
A few hours later he came back to summon me to the meeting room.

.12.  
Science is different to things that are not science. Astrology, for instance, is not science, because it makes value judgments and its results are neither verifiable nor reproducible. Astronomy, on the other hand, is a science because it doesn’t make value judgments and its results are verifiable and reproducible by anyone with a telescope and a calculator. Science is set apart by its refusal to make things up, and its integral error correction mechanism.  
Cryonics is not a science.

.13.  
Picard was in the meeting room with most of the command staff. No one looked happy.  
“I’ll start with the good news,” said Riker, looking at me. “Earlier today, based on information provided by Mr. Steel here, an attempt by Lore to subvert an official Starfleet mission was foiled. Commander Data, the real Data, was subsequently found deactivated inside the wardrobe in his own quarters.”  
I laughed. No one else laughed.  
“While we are very grateful for your intercession, Mr. Steel,” said Picard, “I’m sure you’ll understand our concerns regarding how you came by your insight.”  
This could go two ways. I could tell them the whole truth and watch their tiny little minds blow apart, and possibly be locked up in a mental facility for the rest of my life, or tell a few half-truths in such a way as to create a sense of mystery about myself, or at least underline my potential usefulness. The only way this terrible idea would work is if I committed completely to it. I decided to go for gold.  
“I know lots of things about you, and this ship, that you might not know yourselves. I can be helpful, if you’ll let me.”  
“I’m sure you can, Mr. Steel,” said Picard, smiling, “but that’s not quite the response we were hoping for.”  
“I know. I’m sorry. There are things I just can’t tell you, not because I’m actively promoting a sense of mystery, but for the very real safety of your ship and the crew.”  
This was true as far as I knew. I know that Counsellor Troi could read emotions easily, and would therefore be pressed into service as a lie detector, but also knew that her personal ethics would prevent her from any actual mind-reading. All I had to do was find a way to tell the truth while also leaving out massive chunks of reality. 

 

.14.  
When I came out of the box first, Worf asked for my name. Some inner voice told me not to tell them my real name. I looked at the outside of the metal box and said, “Mr. Steel.” Ironically, I would later remember that the tube was mostly constructed from treated aluminium.

.15.  
A common misconception is that Walt Disney is cryogenically preserved somewhere, maybe under a mountain. Sometimes the story is about his head, sometimes it’s all of him. Whatever way you’ve heard it, it’s not true. He’s buried like a normal person in Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale, California.

.16.  
“What’s occupying our thoughts, Mr. Steel,” said Picard, “is that our materials analysis team confirms everything about your story, but it still doesn’t make sense.”  
“Yeah. I wouldn’t bother going too far down that rabbit hole, to be honest. It’s only going to get worse, and you’re not going to learn anything useful.”  
Everyone stopped and looked at Data, who suddenly realized something was required of him. His pale yellow eyes darted back and forth for a moment before he spoke.  
“Down the rabbit hole, a twentieth century allusion to Lewis Carroll’s seminal fantasy work ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, first published-”  
“Mr. Data. The point.”  
“Apologies, Captain. The phrase refers to an exploration of the unknown, with connotations that further inquiry will not yield results commensurate with the energy and time expended.”  
“I suspected as much,” said Picard. “No we have to figure out what to do with you.”  
“I told you,” I said, “I know things and I can be helpful. I’m sure there’s room on your ship for a mission consultant.”  
“You’ll understand if that sounds a little vague.”  
“Do you need further demonstrations? I know your name is Jean-Luc and your brother Robert runs the family vineyard in France. I also know that he resents your decision to leave the family and join Starfleet.”  
“Yes, I see, but you know that this sort of information is available…”  
“How would I find that out? Surely you can run a diagnostic or whatever to see if I’ve accessed any of your data banks, and find out who I’ve been talking to and what I’ve said. It can’t be that hard. I’ve hardly been here for a day yet.”  
“I’m sure Mr. LaForge could determine that.”  
“Right. And when the reports come back, you’re just going to have to used to the idea that I came out of a 400-year-old box yesterday, had no access to any new information and yet I still seem to know lots of stuff about all of you and this ship.”

.17.  
When I was in my final year of university, I was involved in a number of group projects. Group projects are always a waste of time. Every time we had a meeting, we’d all have to travel at the speed of the slowest member. Inevitably, someone would get sick of handicapping himself against his will and just run the entire project as a solo operation and agreed to give everyone the credit.  
Sometimes that person was me.

.18.  
A few months after I first arrived on the Enterprise, I had settled in comfortably, more or less. Picard even allowed me on an away mission, a trade delegation to a planet attempting to court the attentions of United Federation of Planets, so there wasn’t much damage I could do. The away team was amused when I so fervently insisted on a yellow shirt.  
Being transported materially from one place to another is not a strange as you might think. It doesn’t really feel like anything, because you’re put into a stasis field before your atoms are mapped, so when you come out of the stasis field, it’s as if nothing happened. It’s nothing like waking up, where there’s a sense of putting things together in your mind. It’s more like if you were going for a run and all the scenery around you changed suddenly. Once you get used to it, it’s no problem at all.  
Also, because of the stasis field, if you were running when you were beamed up, the energy and direction are preserved too, so you’d keep going at the same speed wherever you ended up. This is why it’s important to do the math on the location. There were reports from early transporter tests of people dropping off cliffs after being transported while in motion.  
The brief transporter protocol training course they made me take insists that you stand straight up and perfectly still while preparing for possibly uneven ground. You don’t see much of it on the show, but whenever I used the transporter, there was always one person whose first action post-transport was to fall over.

.19.  
I am not a violent man. I’d never hurt anyone for any reason. I don’t sit at home plotting revenge on the bullies who pushed me around at school. My only regret is that they wasted my time, which would surely have been more productively spent watching cartoons or playing with Lego. I don’t secretly wish I was stronger or better armed so I could handle myself in a fight. I happily flee from any sort of physical confrontation.  
At certain specific points, despite my best attempts to avoid it, various members of the Enterprise crew honestly felt that I was the most dangerous person they had ever come across. There was no way to dispel these ridiculous notions without getting into even more ridiculous discussions that I just didn’t want to have.

.20.  
Very soon after my first away mission, I met Q, an omnipotent being who had an unhealthy obsession with the Enterprise and Picard in particular. I recognised him immediately, of course, from the television show. I found it a little disappointing that he hadn’t made an appearance, to be honest. I was on the bridge, speaking to Picard about a possible future problem with the dilithium supply, and suddenly Riker was Q. He just popped into Riker’s body, stood up suddenly, grabbed me by the shoulders and turned to Picard.  
“Don’t tell me you’ve made a new best friend! I’m hurt.”  
“This is Mr. Steel,” said Picard. “A consultant who’s been working with us for the past few months.”  
I knew from watching the show that Q should know pretty much everything about everything, and therefore see right through my badly-informed gibberish.  
“Don’t you know who I am?” I asked.  
“No,” he said, genuinely confused. He came over and stared straight into my eyes. “I don’t.”  
He clicked his fingers and suddenly everyone was wearing Hawaiian shirts. Except me. He looked at me intently and clicked his fingers again. There was still no change. I tried not to look as surprised as he was. He should have been able to atomise me with a thought, so, having nothing to lose, I did my best to eliminate the shake in my body and voice.  
“Your amateur magic tricks won’t work on me, Q.”  
“I’m sorry,” he said, flustered and stepping back. There was a vague look of recognition, followed by unmistakable terror. “I had no idea.”  
“I’m not surprised,” I said, “I had no idea myself.”  
“I shall leave immediately, of course,” he said, and clicked his fingers a last time, returning everyone to their original condition before disappearing.  
Instead of thanking me, Picard felt this incident justified another command staff meeting. In that moment, he looked more terrified of me than Q had. 

.21.  
Cryonics was always interesting to me, and it turned out it wasn’t entirely boring to everyone else. The only group project I engaged with was for the compulsory medical ethics course. There were five other people in my group, which included the three people who helped me with my company.  
We got along well, but they all shared an inexplicable devotion to Star Trek, a show which never interested me. I liked police shows and sitcoms.  
Sarah and Steven would speak Klingon to each other and dress up for conventions, yet I’m the one crawling through Jeffries Tubes and beaming down to planets.  
I often found myself thinking how much easier they would have found the whole experience. 

.22.  
I was very uncomfortable around Counsellor Troi. I trusted her not intentionally read my mind, but there was always a danger that she might accidentally, or on the suggestion of Picard if he had a sincere concern for the safety of his ship.  
If she picked up a hint of what I knew, that we were all walking through a fictional television show from 350 years in the past, who knew what sort of madness it could trigger; an existential crisis like no one has ever seen. They might decide to drive the ship into the nearest sun.

.23.  
Earth is at least two hundred million light years away from the nearest planet that could possibly support the sort of carbon-based life we can relate to. This means that it takes two hundred million years for light, the fastest thing in the universe, to get there. Presumably this means that something that was not as mobile and mass-free as a photon of light would take considerably longer to get there than two hundred million years. Even if there was some magical power source that could propel a spacecraft at close to the speed of light for over two hundred million years, the life cycle of any life form on board would have to turn over at a rate that would render everything impossible.  
We just woke up as a species on this planet about ten thousand years ago. The entirety of human history as we know it would have to cycle through twenty thousand times, and that’s just to get there. The return journey would have exactly the same problems.  
Most science fiction shows have ignored this problem, or explained it away with some unexplained nonsense (like “hyperdrive”), because if you want to have a show about people regularly meeting aliens, you need to have some way to travel unimaginable distances in under forty-five minutes (plus the ad breaks).  
The Enterprise has a bright white pulsing glow-worm of faster-than-light travel sitting right in the middle of the engineering section called the “warp core”. Geordi tried, but I still have no idea how it works. 

.24.  
Everyone was rattled in the wake of the incident with Q. The most powerful entity they were aware of had just been scared off by me. I’m not entirely sure myself whom he thought I was, or why his tricks didn’t work on me, but for some reason I knew, or suspected, that they wouldn’t. I just didn’t fit in with this world, and for someone as embedded in the fabric of the universe as Q, I’m surprised he even managed to see me.  
Commander Data once asked me if I missed my home. I told him I never felt at home, even in my own home, so it wasn’t too bad.

.25.  
When I was sixteen, I went to a disco. I didn’t want to go. I was talked into it by my parents, who were very concerned about my reclusive nature, and felt that I should meet some people my own age and have fun, although they never explained what that meant. I was given specific instructions to not come home before midnight  
It was noisy and horrible. I got talking to a girl, and she said that she was having horrible stomach pains. I expressed concern, and her friend told me to “leave her alone” it was “her monthly” something. I had no idea what the hell she was talking about. I told her if she was getting this sort of stomach cramp often, she should probably see a doctor. Everyone laughed, so I went downstairs and called my father and told him I had to go home because I wasn’t having any fun, and I wasn’t sure what that meant anyway.  
In the car on the way home, I sat staring out the passenger window. Eventually, my father said: "It’s OK - you don’t have to go to those things anymore."

.26.  
I needed some sort of trust exercise, or a demonstration of my bona fides, without having to tell them the whole horrible truth.  
At the ensuing command staff meeting, I pitched some ideas to Picard. First, I suggested that Dr. Crusher give me an in-depth medical examination, until she was satisfied that I was fully human. Then I suggested taking a lie detector test, which would amount to Counsellor Troi standing behind me, so long as we could agree on the list of questions beforehand.  
Worf and Riker resisted this idea vigorously, so we compromised that each member of the command staff present at my interrogation could ask one surprise question at the end of my prepared list of questions.  
The prospect of this terrified me, but not as much as an enraged Worf fighting his corner. 

.27.  
The world is full of rich people who want to live forever. Some of them are not so much afraid of dying, they just regarded cryonics as a status symbol. We often fielded inquiries from chunky CEOs driving fast, foreign cars with girlfriends half their age. These people are the easiest to deal with because they never ask any of the important questions. They were far more interested in the loyalty scheme, a nice term we used for the various means to advertise participation in the programme. There were some nice t-shirts, and a very official-looking certificate which was, as we made clear, “suitable for framing”.  
It was all contrived bullshit, of course, but without those clients, who turned out to be the unwitting donators of our start-up capital, we would have had no business at all.

.28.  
“Do you intend to harm anyone on the Enterprise, or hinder in any way any of its crew or missions?”  
“No.”  
Troi nodded quickly at Picard. Picard nodded at Data, who moved on to the next question.  
“Since you have arrived here, have you in any way harmed or hindered any member of the crew or any of our missions?”  
“No.”  
Another nod. Worf and LaForge were in the room, but Riker was on the bridge, presumably driving the ship, or whatever they do on there. I was never entirely clear on that.  
“He’s hiding something,” said Troi confidently, before Data could get to the next question.  
“Of course I’m hiding something!” I said. Over the previous few months, I had grown tired of Troi’s empathic powers whose most obvious manifestations were obvious statements of observation. “I told you at the start that I was hiding something. Let him get to that bit! All you have to do is work out if I’m lying or not, OK?”  
“I encourage my officers to show initiative, Mr. Steel,” said Picard. “I’m sure we can count on your indulgence just for the moment.”  
“Yes, of course, sorry,” I said. “Next question, Data!”  
Data waited for an almost imperceptible nod from Picard before continuing.  
“Would it be catastrophic for the Enterprise and her crew if anyone apart from you were to learn the information you admit to keeping from us?”  
“Yes.”  
Another nod from Troi. I have no idea how her telepathic powers worked on me while Q’s presumably more powerful ability didn’t. Maybe I was somehow in control of everything, and I needed Troi’s powers to work whereas I needed Q’s to fail. Maybe as the only non-fictional part of this scenario, I had some sort of influence over events. I don’t know.

.29.  
Freezing people should be easy. You could train a monkey to operate the machine. The trick should be in making sure the living tissue defrosts in the right way. Previous research indicated that a very slow, controlled freezing process would produce the best thaw results. With Hassan, who called himself our “meat scientist”, I discovered something completely unexpected – the removal of all possible fluids coupled with flash freezing could solve most of the problems associated with a messy thaw.  
We tried our new technique on a mouse that had been drained of all blood, positioning it so it displayed as much surface area as possible, sinking some electrodes with targeting sensors into its body. We dropped it into a tank of super-cooled nitrogen and then thawed it out.  
There are technical details about the warming process that don’t really matter, but the essence is that you need to defrost the body’s infrastructure before any of the fluids can come online. The total removal of fluids makes this part much easier.  
The mouse only lived for a few seconds, but for those few seconds we had definite brain function, and all the signs were that the major organs were coming back online too. 

.30.  
The first scary random question was from Worf.  
“Regardless of your no doubt honourable intentions, are you capable of damaging any of our crew or our ship?”  
“No more than any other average human, I expect.”  
Well, that was easy. The next question, from Troi herself, was as easy as it was predictable.  
“Do you have any psychic or telepathic abilities of any kind?”  
“No.”  
Picard had put some thought into his question.  
“Why was Q afraid of you?”  
“Look, Captain, Troi is going to get a massive spike on this, but I’m not entirely sure. I have a good idea, obviously, but it makes up a good chunk of the stuff I can’t tell you for reasons of security. I don’t want you to think I’m dismissing your question, or failing to honour our agreement, but I’m asking you to understand my position.”  
A more cautious nod from Troi. The last question was from Data. Over the last few months, we had spent a lot of time together. I would go as far as to call us friends. Data was the only person I could really get along with, because he was unable to take flights of fancy with regard to my intentions or origins. He only dealt with what he knew to be true and worked from there. Unfortunately, the complete absence of value judgement might lead him to the only possible scenario that fit all the facts. Data, like his hero Sherlock Holmes, believed that once you had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however improbably, must be the truth.  
“Are you real?”  
His question surprised everyone. It was so close to the truth that I didn’t know how to answer. He had worked out the bulk of the riddle, and just bounced the wrong way at the last hurdle. There was no way he was getting away with this. I would have to talk to him later.  
“As far as I know,” I said, which was as true as anything else I told them, which was more or less.

 

.31.  
Cryogenics: The study of how to produce very low temperatures, and how materials behave at those temperatures.  
Cryobiology: The study of the effects of very low temperatures on organisms for the purpose of achieving cryopreservation.  
Cryosurgery: Applying very low temperatures to destroy malignant tumours.  
Cryoelectronics: The study of superconductivity at low temperatures.  
Cryotronics: The practical application of cryoelectronics.  
Cryopreservation: Preservation of any substance susceptible to damage caused by chemical reactivity or time by cooling to very low temperatures.  
Cryonics: The emerging medical technology of cryopreserving humans and animals with the intention of future revival; "cryonics" is often erroneously referred to as "cryogenics”.  
Cryoethics: The study of the ethical implications surrounding cryonics. 

.32.  
On yet another Prime Directive-busting away mission, there was some sort of mix-up. We beamed into a small rocky dip which had good views of the rough ground sloping upwards on both sides. Almost immediately, we could see some screaming locals coming over the ridge, running at us with spears aloft.  
“Phasers to stun!” said Worf, immediately adopting a defensive position.  
“Calm down,” I said. “You don’t want to antagonise them for no reason.”  
“I am not going to simply stand here and allow us to be killed,” said Worf, although I had a hard time hearing him over the racket.  
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll be the grown-up.” I charged out towards the stampeding mob, who obligingly stopped right in front of me, and offered me pieces of fruit that they had impaled on the tips of their spears.  
Later, on the ship, Worf more or less acknowledged that I had a positive influence on the mission. I was working on the assumption that no intelligent species would charge mindlessly at a bunch of people, who were clearly not local, for no reason at all. I have since learned that this assumption was false.

 

.33.  
I can’t eat peanuts. I’m not allergic; I just can’t stand them. I can’t stand the smell of peanuts or peanut butter and I can’t be near someone who has eaten them. I have no idea why. There are no peanut-related childhood traumas that I’m aware of, and I don’t think there’s anything in peanuts that my body should reject. In fact, apparently, they’re very good for you.  
One of the many things I found very peculiar about my stay on the Enterprise is that I could eat peanuts.

.34.  
Money changes people. Some people reject that idea, but it does. If you’re born with it, you very quickly develop a sense of entitlement, that somehow you deserve all this money because you work hard and you’re smart. You tell yourself these ridiculous things, even though you daily observe many minimum wage employees working ten times harder than you ever will, because after all you have to sleep at night.  
If you’re new to money, if you’ve just won the lottery, you’ll promise yourself that you’ll stay grounded and just buy that BMW and take that round-the-world trip, but before you know it, you’re the sort of person who drives a BMW and takes trips around the world. Nearly all our funding came from these nouveaux riches.  
The Enterprise doesn’t seem to have any money at all – no medium of exchange for goods and services. Because I was regarded as a special guest, which on a starship is alarmingly close to being a prisoner, I had everything I needed provided for me. There was occasionally some vague talk of “credits”, but when pressed, no one could explain the system to me.

.35.  
I was bullied at school, which made me naturally suspicious, reclusive and disinclined to make friends, or perhaps vice versa. At home, I preferred to stay inside by myself. Occasionally, during the summer, I would play with the children of the neighborhood. I felt that I should be hanging around with the older kids (who were not that much older), but they had no time for me.  
Sometimes they would play Hide & Seek, and they would let me go first. At some point, my mother noticed that no one was looking for me, and they clearly never intended to start. My mother said she saw the older kids laughing at me. She had a hard time with this emotionally, but she didn’t feel like explaining to a five-year-old that no one likes him, so she just dragged me out of my hiding place, all the while I was protesting, “No! They’ll see me! I’m hiding!”  
After a while, my parents decided to let me play Hide & Seek in the safety of our house, but the experiences with the neighbours must have left some scars because I remember giving very clear directions to my hiding place before going there, and after going there: “I’m behind the curtains!” 

.36.  
In university, a lot of people took drugs. I never did, at least not recreationally. During some of our experiments, I’d have to take an interesting cocktail of drugs: biological anti-freeze. Anything that gave us more control was considered, anything that might reduce the chances of the brain cells snapping on “re-entry”. For some reason, we used flight metaphors when talking about the process. Freezing was “blastoff” and thawing out was “landing”, and so on.  
I had a friend who studied pure maths and number theory. At that level, maths is less like maths and more like philosophy, but a sort of philosophy that has to add up. We used to meet every day and talk about our work. I’d tell him as much as I thought I’d legally get away with and he told me as much as he thought I’d understand. Sometimes he would talk about his experiments with LSD and how they helped him understand how all things are related.  
After I moved to the private sector, when I got my degree, he was working on a paper to demonstrate that all maths was useless, a series of axioms and functions designed to explain everything in terms of itself, essentially tautological, and therefore incapable of recognising or processing any new information. I read it, but I had no idea what he was talking about.

.37.  
I was asleep when the Borg came. An alarm woke me up, and I was summoned to a meeting in Picard’s ready room. The familiar image of the Borg cube ship was on a screen on the main bridge when I walked through, and on a smaller screen in the meeting room.  
“Oh whoops,” I said. “The Borg.”  
“You know what that is?” asked Riker.  
“You don’t?”  
“No,” said Picard. “If you could perhaps indulge us, Mr. Steel?”  
As far as I knew, the first encounter with the Borg happened as a result of the first encounter with Q. They were clearly familiar with Q, although we hadn’t seen him since he reacted to my presence. I felt that I should clarify their history before putting my foot in it.  
“How did you meet them?” I asked.  
“We’re on a deep space survey mission, looking for possible Gamma Quadrant sources of dilithium. I’m sure you’ve read the reports we sent to your quarters.”  
“Let’s say that I did.”  
“Then we bumped into this. They seem to be matching our speed and trajectory no matter which evasive action we take.”  
“Yeah, they do that. Any contact?”  
“They’re not answering hails. We did a quick scan and Geordi thinks their receiver might be down.”  
When they started using each other’s first names, you knew things were serious. I genuinely wanted to be as helpful as possible, but I wasn’t really paying attention to those episodes.  
“I don’t think so. These are Borg. They’ll contact you soon with some overblown threat trying to intimidate you into surrender because you’ll be assimilated one way or the other. That’s what they do. They run around the universe assimilating any people or cultures they think might be useful.”  
“Assimilate?”  
“Yeah. They sort of put these little metal implants all over so you’re 50% robot and fix your brain so it only accepts orders from the collective, like a beehive, except with bees at least you get honey, but I don’t see any benefit at all from these guys, to be honest.”  
There was silence in the room. I’m sure I could have phrased it better, but time was a factor.  
“How do we fight them?” asked Worf.  
“Ah, yes. Well. There’s not much point in using your phasers. When they beam aboard-”  
“When they what? Our shields are up.”  
“That won’t make a difference. They’re coming. I’m surprised they haven’t had a go already.”  
There was a beep. Geordi hit his chest communicator. There followed a panicked and garbled message, the essence of which was that some half-humanoid creatures were beaming into engineering, scanning the computers and the warp core, and beaming out again. Before I could talk him out of it, Picard had despatched Worf to take a security team and deal with it.  
“There’s not much point. They’re coming over here next. They’ll probably grab a few of us and take us back to the cube to be assimilated.”  
“Won’t they be afraid of you?” Riker asked sarcastically. I never liked him in the show, but in real life, he was fantastic.  
“I don’t think so. Q was able to think. The Bord don’t think; they’re just charged with performing very specific functions and tasks with clearly defined parameters. They might not even notice me.”  
“And I suppose you’re not going to tell us how to beat them? How do we know you’re not one of them?”  
“That’s enough, Will,” said Picard. “Mr. Steel has more than proved his worth to us in the past, and I’m sure he won’t let us down this time.”  
I couldn’t remember anything useful. I had an image of Q whipping them into no man’s land for fun, when they met the Borg, and I remember when Picard was assimilated as Locutus, but not much else.  
“They’ll adapt very quickly to your phaser frequencies. They have individual force fields so the stun setting won’t have any effect. Set them at the highest setting and try to change the frequency every few seconds, or even better, per blast, if you think that might help.”  
“I’m on it,” said Geordi, and ran out the door.  
“Is there anything else we should know?” asked Riker.  
“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to look for a hammer. Let’s see the creepy little bastards adapt to the frequency on that!”

.38.  
Ants are a highly-intelligent, social species. They regularly sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony, and seem to work very well together. In fact, they’re just responding to a series of pheromone trails and markers left by other ants. They have no idea what they’re doing, and absolutely no sense of purpose.  
When ants go on the march, they follow the pheromone trail left by the ant in front. If the ant in front for some reason doubles back, or goes around in a circle, it can cause an “ant mill”, the informal name for a mass of ants, sometimes containing thousands of individuals, all scrambling around in a circle, each following the pheromone trail of the ant in front. Sometimes, they keep milling around like that until they die. When this happens, it is promoted from an “ant mill” to a “death spiral”.  
When an ant dies under normal circumstances, it releases a certain pheromone which tells the other ants to pick up the body and throw it onto the trash heap that ant colonies have outside their nest. Scientists can isolate the death pheromone. When they apply this pheromone to a normal, live ant, the rest of the ants grab the marked ant, very much against its will, and throw it onto the trash pile outside the nest.  
An ant can lift fifty times its own weight, but it can’t even walk in a straight line or correctly identify a dead body without explicit instructions, and only then when those instructions are expressed as a release of pheromones.

.39.  
The Star Trek engagement protocol is called the Prime Directive, which essentially dictates a policy of non-interference in less developed worlds, who should be allowed to progress in the natural way. Even simply revealing oneself as an alien in a world with no experience of aliens could dramatically influence their entire culture. Human precedent demonstrates that every single time any culture interacts with a less developed culture, however well-intentional, it is catastrophic for the less-developed culture. The Prime Directive was wrought in the wake of this 100% hit rate.  
I never really cared that they break it in almost every episode. I understand that a show based on alien encounters isn’t going to get very far if they never meet any aliens, and I’m all for breaking every rule in the book if it makes things funny or interesting. I have a problem with the theory.  
If the Prime Directive is so important that it’s called the Prime Directive, there’s no reason to assume that any culture or species should adopt it. As all races everywhere will be at different rates of development, no one’s ever going to meet anyone, and if any Starfleet officers meet any more advanced civilisation, they should just back off or face their own annihilation. They never do. They always want to ”learn all about them” to “develop technologies” to “cure cancer” or “make our ships more efficient” or whatever.  
Some logical conclusions:  
1\. The Prime Directive is a good idea and therefore we should never interact with other aliens.  
2\. The Prime Directive’s criteria for what counts as “more advanced” or “less advanced” are so broad that the terms are essentially meaningless.  
3\. The Prime Directive only applies to situations where another civilisation might benefit from our technological progress (itself at least partially mined from more advanced civilisations).  
As you can see, the logical conclusions shred either the Prime Directive itself, or condemns those who follow it to a life of nonsense and hypocrisy. I never mentioned any of this to Picard. I don’t think it would benefit anyone.  
The Borg, on the other hand, have an evil twin of the Prime Directive. They don’t have a fancy, important name for it, but they keep saying, “You will be assimilated,” and lots of the time the people who hear that are, in fact, assimilated. I did not want to be assimilated.

.40.  
Mr. Cartwright arrived to our office straight out of central casting. He was very thin, wore glasses and a black suit, and carried a briefcase. He had made an appointment to discuss funding our operation. The feel of central casting did not leave when he sat in our meeting room with myself and Hassan, whose English was patchy and didn’t like speaking out loud. His Klingon was perfect, of course.  
“Let’s get straight to the point,” said Mr. Cartwright. “I have been authorised by my employer to offer a considerable sum of money in exchange for your entire operation. All of your jobs will be secure, of course.”  
“What do you mean the entire operation?” I asked.  
“The whole thing. All of it.”  
For some reason I wasn’t in a selling mood. I certainly didn’t speak for the whole company, but I was driving the research and often did the talking. I knew Hassan would go along with whatever I said, because he always did, so I just had to convince the other two, the other 50% of the company.  
There followed some tense efforts at negotiation before he told us that he was actually a representative of the U.S. Government, in particular a private research and development company that was exclusively funded by NASA, and they wanted the rest of our research to be nationalised.

.41.  
On the way to the turbolift, I felt a solid hand on my shoulder. It was attached to a deathly white arm and had some black bits of metal embedded in it. Data tried to pull the Borg off me, but he was effortlessly thumped into a wall for his trouble.  
“Don’t worry about me,” I shouted at Data over the general clamour on the bridge. I meant it, too.  
“I am incapable of worry, or any other emotion,” he said calmly before I dematerialised. 

.42.  
At the emergency board meeting I called to discuss how I handled Mr. Cartwright’s offer, I should have been less surprised. I went in confident, and very soon realise that I was going to lose.  
“I just didn’t think we were that sort of company, that’s not who we want to be, is it?” I said firmly.  
“Yes,” said Sandra, whose previous contributions to the meetings amounted to barely more than Hassan’s, “but it’s a lot of money.”  
We were all being careful about how we phrased our jumbling thoughts. There was a lot of tension in the air, and it was all directed at me. Even the normally malleable Hassan was sitting closer to Sandra than he ever did before. Although we each owned twenty-five percent of the company and were technically equal partners, it had always been up to me to drive policy, make all the important decisions and speak for the group.  
At least two of the group (Sandra and Hassan), in retrospect, seemed to have very little engagement with the project at all once they had finished their part of the start-up. I should have guessed they were just waiting to sell out at the first opportunity. Conversely, the normally talkative Steve wasn’t saying anything. He just sat there trying not to make eye contact with anyone, and when the vote came through, I was alone.  
With a shaky voice, I told them that the shady government representative from central casting made it clear that he was open for business whenever if we changed our minds, and if we needed to have another conversation with him, it could be very easily arranged. Then, in the middle of some conversation, I got up and left, leaving nothing but Mr. Cartwright’s business card where my notes had been. 

.43.  
On the Borg ship, I woke up in some sort of plastic box barely big enough to contain my body. I tried to turn around but my hips kept bonking into the sides, causing a dull thud. I could see lights and moving shapes through the translucent material, but they didn’t seem to notice me.  
Sometime after I had stopped struggling, the lid of the box was unlocked, and the face of a Borg looked down at me. I instinctively reached up to grab something, maybe one of the wires sticking out of his neck or face, when I saw that my arm was a machine. Some sort of black metal arm, with pincer-like attachments where there should have been a hand, clearly responding to the signals my brain was sending. I couldn’t stop staring at it. The Borg used this distraction as a way to inject me with some sort of sedative and I passed out again. 

.44.  
When we set up as an independent company, the most ferocious arguments were not about money, or ethics, or methodology. We were all more or less on the same page then.  
We argued for a full week’s worth of meetings about what to call our company. What do you call a company that freezes terminally ill or terminally bored people for later re-entry?  
Sandra with her usual lack of imagination, wanted to call us Cryonics. Just like that. Not Cryonics Ltd., or Cryonics Inc. She thought it sounded professional with a slight edge of inevitability.  
Hassan liked a phrase in the Koran, which he translated as “they shall recline on couches ranged in rows”, which he claimed was something which happened to the good Muslims after death, and felt it was appropriate for all sorts of reasons we rejected immediately.  
Steve, whose part of the project was more or less over before the company was set up, felt the freedom to act as comic relief during these meetings, and at various times wanted to call our company: Cryo Me A River; Cool Party; Dead Gorgeous; Ice Age; and so on. It was a terrible time for all of us.  
After the tidal wave of horrible ideas from Steve, it was a simple matter for everyone to approve my suggestion: Industrial Cryonics Engineering. With no small amount of vanity, I was hoping to hear references to ‘ICE’ in future discussions of the history of cryonics. 

.45.  
There’s no sense of being forced to do things against your will, as you might imagine. There’s no “real you” sitting in your subconscious, screaming to be heard. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It’s quiet. I never realised how much noise and uncertainty there was in my brain until the Borg removed it.  
Imagine knowing exactly what the purpose of your life is, and knowing exactly how to do it, and having absolutely no concerns or opinions about what’s going to happen in five minutes, or five years. I’m sure that sounds like hell to most people, but the Borg helpfully removed the part of the brain that controls those feelings.  
There’s not much in the way of abstract thought, not much thought at all. Borg don’t torture themselves with solving philosophical conundrums about right and wrong in the same way that humans don’t spend much time wondering why a triangle has three sides. I imagine certain free-thinking aliens might be attracted to the Borg lifestyle in the same way that some of us might be attracted to psychoactive drugs.  
Starfleet doesn’t talk about it much, but there are some remote and atavistic colonies who effectively worship the Borg in the form of a cult. However, in a twisted version of the Prime Directive, the Borg only assimilate those who they feel can be of use to the collective, so these colonists are ironically ignored by the objects of their adoration. I’m still not entirely sure why they took me. 

.46.  
Several months after we sold out to the government, our methodology, our systems, our equipment, our whole mission was transformed. We were now working on long-term space travel and nothing else. All the capital we raised from the idle rich had been repaid and all contracts had been cancelled. We were no longer selling immortality. We were cogs in a space exploration machine.  
The other three seemed to fit right in, but I hated it. I had no interest at all in being part of the space programme.  
I tried fighting for my programme, the research which actually interested me, but was shot down at committee level and by my direct supervisor. Everything which interested me about the work had been taken away, replaced by practical considerations, targets, goals, project management, vertical integration, synergy and tiny little stuffed toys mounted on desktop monitors instead of developing personalities.  
When I was working on prolonging life, I had a brief glimpse of what it must have been like for the medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold. Half of the time, fully aware that what you’re doing is technically impossible and close to lunacy. The other half, the work tantalised you with the prospect that just around the corner was the breakthrough you needed to make the impossible happen. I got none of that from working for the government.  
When they needed someone to volunteer as the first human test-subject for their long-range cryonic isolation units, I made sure my name was top of the list. The plan was to freeze me, send me around the solar system for a few years, thaw me out and do extensive tests to survey the damage to my tissue. The very worst that could happen, in my view, was that I would die in outer space.  
To me, this would have been preferable to the horrible life I saw in my future. They had turned me into one of them: a corporate hack, secretly delighted with his nine-to-five job and his guaranteed pension and health benefits. I hated everything about myself and my position. I wanted the experiment to go horribly wrong and kill me, leaving me stranded in an orbit around Jupiter.  
I came out of that box 350 years later, pointed at some guys wearing red shirts and said the first thing that popped into my head, which was, "You guys should be extra careful today; I have a feeling you might end up dead." 

.47.  
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

.48.  
Resistance is futile.


End file.
